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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27188065">someone that i used to be, someone that i will be</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble'>mutterandmumble</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Anger, Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Explicit Language, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Just two bros, Morbid Humor, Platonic Relationships, Spoilers, Takes place start of trk, all the way through to the end, chillin outside the space time continuum, unlikely friendship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 03:55:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,739</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27188065</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Noah Czerny contemplates, Maura Sargent mediates, and time flies when you’re having fun</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Maura Sargent &amp; Noah Czerny, No Romantic Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>someone that i used to be, someone that i will be</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Warnings for everything in the tags, themes/talk of death and sacrifice, basically anything in the books involving noah, and some very morbid humor</p>
<p>Title from I don’t know, which in turn is from the musical ghost quartet</p>
<p>Anyways this is the most natural feeling thing i’ve written in a long time and it’s a little niche but noah’s my favorite character and i love time as a motif and it’s something that noah and maura share, and so i figured why not and now here we are. Also I could talk about noah at length because he hits on tons of tropes and stuff that i like but i often think about his anger in particular, because noahs in this very awkward position of being perpetually 17 and having to grieve for himself and the loss of his whole entire life and future while also running right alongside all those people who he knows will make it out the other side of everything largely <i>because</i> he doesn’t get to live. It makes for a dynamic that i feel shows the most in either the scene where he kisses blue or the murdered/remembered bit, and i don't know i just think about it a lot.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Noah does not remember much about being alive but he does remember this: on days where he was out doing things he wasn’t meant be doing long into the early hours of the morning- which was often, as Noah does not remember much about being alive but he remembers that he was something as wild and reckless as the night is long- the world seemed to stop bursting at its seams and instead shifted towards something softer, something grayer and leaner and and a little less mean. When he was still flesh and blood it was the novelty of it that drove him to seek out one in the morning, two and three and four regardless of the consequences (failed tests and broken thoughts, sweatshirts balled into makeshift pillows on desks as he tried to rationalize Whelk’s quiet, persistent sneers); he was driven by that and then the quiet thrill he got from feeling as though he was witnessing something that no one else had ever seen before, and something so new and wobbly-legged and fragile that no one else would ever see it again.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Now that Noah’s dead, he’s only awake long into the early hours of the morning because he can’t sleep. He may not always be </span>
  <em>
    <span>there, </span>
  </em>
  <span>not consistently present in his form or his sloppy approximation of a body- that would be exhausting- but that pattern of here and there and back again is less </span>
  <em>
    <span>sleeping </span>
  </em>
  <span>and more </span>
  <em>
    <span>phasing. </span>
  </em>
  <span>In one ear, out the other. From today to tomorrow and then tomorrow to today, slipped through time like a coin through the floorboards. And that would be bearable (even if not necessarily </span>
  <em>
    <span>good</span>
  </em>
  <span>) if Noah had anything to do once the day went through its motions and his friends all went to sleep, but as it is right now Noah is firmly stuck in time and it’s nearly three, and he’s so bored that he can hardly see straight. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He’s set himself up in the kitchen of 300 Fox Way like he sometimes does when there’s nothing else for him to do (because while he can’t sleep but he can’t do much else as either; they may offer senior discounts at the movie theater but they don’t offer </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead as a doornail </span>
  </em>
  <span>discounts) and he can’t seem to get himself up and moving again so he supposes that he must be waiting for something. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>That’s what he boils down to most of the time: waiting, waiting, waiting. For what he doesn’t know. Noah just sits in the kitchen until he finds that he wants to be anywhere else at all, and then he finds that he can’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>move </span>
  </em>
  <span>anywhere else at all no matter how hard he tries, and then he figures that he doesn’t want to find out what’ll happen if he keeps on trying to move regardless so he sits there and he waits. And he thinks, and he doesn’t phase, and he watches the clock tick on through the minutes and he waits. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Whatever it is that he’s waiting for should hurry up. Noah’s seen this room hundreds of times over, and he knows it down to the cracks in the walls, down to the mismatched knobs on the cupboards and the occasional little cousin who wanders in for a late night glass of water before sticking her tongue out at him (he does the same right back) and scampering off back to her room, and there’s only so many times that a person can entertain themselves by kicking at the wobbly old tale legs before things start getting dull. The only other option is for Noah to think, and if Noah is going to think then he has to think about himself, and if he has to think about himself then he has to think about what he’s becoming and if he has to think about what he’s becoming then he has to think about what he’s already become and then he has to think about what he isn’t quite yet and what he is in the in-betweens and the hereafters and the wheres and whys and hows and </span>
  <em>
    <span>well. </span>
  </em>
  <span>He doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>want </span>
  </em>
  <span>to. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He doesn’t want to so Noah kicks back in his chair, counts the tiles above the sink, and he keeps on waiting.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>For a minute or an hour or thirty seconds he waits, tipped far enough back on the legs of his chair that if he were in school his teachers would snap at him to </span>
  <em>
    <span>stop that before he cracks his head open </span>
  </em>
  <span>and he’d respond that they’re a little late for that, thanks, and really of the many dangerous things in this classroom his chair is among the lesser evils. He waits for a while or he doesn’t wait for long, it doesn’t really matter in the end. What matters is that eventually the door that leads into the backyard creaks open and someone comes drifting through, and Noah lets his chair fall back against the floor with a </span>
  <em>
    <span>thump </span>
  </em>
  <span>and makes himself comfortable because something inside of him is saying that this is what he’s been waiting for and Noah’s long learned to listen when some ominous, otherworldly thing inside of him says that </span>
  <em>
    <span>this is it.</span>
  </em>
  <span> So he slouches over, and he watches as Maura Sargent creeps her way into the kitchen and closes the door behind her. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She’s dressed like she was working on something, in a thin cotton shirt that’s plain and light blue, worn to something smooth and shapeless, and a pair of jeans. Her hair is in a haze around her head, her eyes drowsy and a deep, dark brown; her skin is stretched smooth over her cheekbones and the moonlight is tugging out the planes and shadows that hide beneath her bones. There’s a bracelet made of thread clasped tight around her wrist, olive greens striped over a shade of purple that’s striking against her soft brown skin, and there’s the odd smear of soil on her sleeve and the odd sprig of grass ground into her jeans and the odd fleck of dust splattered over her shoulder. She moves with her whole body all at once in a slow, sure way, like a cat balanced on top of a fence, and she looks terribly, strikingly, unbelievably like Blue. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Maura doesn’t startle when she sees him sitting there, elbows propped carelessly on the table and legs kicked up onto the chair across from him. He knows that he must look something of a nightmare these days, pale and gaunt and drawn- you’d think he’d seen a ghost- and the moonlight does him no favors, not like it does for Maura Sargent who the earth seems to love in the same way it loves the sun or the sky. The moonlight creeps over her shoulders and drapes itself down around her neck like a hug, like the whole wide world is wrapping itself around her torso. It is what it is, Noah supposes. Maura Sargent doesn’t necessarily exist in the </span>
  <em>
    <span>here </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>now </span>
  </em>
  <span>and Noah Czerny doesn’t necessarily exist in the </span>
  <em>
    <span>here </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>now,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and though they may be similar in that they’ve no particular attachment to this plane of being over any other, Noah’s shoulders and neck and torso will never see the light of day (or the light of the moon, or the shine of the stars, or the cheap artificial yellow of a lamplight) ever again, and when Maura Sargent makes a circle of herself and her actions she knows full well why.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Maybe that’s a psychic thing, maybe that’s an adult thing. Noah doesn’t know. Noah </span>
  <em>
    <span>does </span>
  </em>
  <span>know that they’re existing together now, Noah at the table and Maura halfway through the door, and he knows that Maura knows the same because she still hasn’t startled but she has begun to smile, an expression that’s a small quirk of the lips and a sharp twitch of the cheeks and more in the eyes than anything. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Hello there. Would you like some tea?” she asks. Her voice is softened by her accent, good-humored and curious. Not surprised, not confused, not uneasy or unsure; she speaks as though she was expecting him. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah shrugs, a little stung. “I can’t drink it,” he tells her, because he can’t. Noah can’t drink or eat or sleep or grow, because Noah is dead and rotting in a makeshift grave on a ley line. Noah is not even skin and bones. Noah is a set of instincts that are only half his own and some shaky morals that have been decaying for years and years on end now. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Maura hums at that, not-quite smile still stuck on her face. She moves closer, cool and careful as can be with none of the caution that he probably ought to be approached to by this point in his hellish little life-death-life-but-not-really cycle. She looks sort of sad, he thinks, in a mysterious psychic way, but then he supposes that he must look </span>
  <em>
    <span>very </span>
  </em>
  <span>sad in a deteriorating ghost kind of way so he can’t really judge. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Would you like to pretend?” Maura says. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah blinks at her, taken aback. He flexes his fingers, pops the knuckles and kicks at the table legs again and again as he considers. Would he like to pretend? Would he? Noah’s been doing a lot of pretending lately. He looks much more like he ought to these days, which means that if he doesn’t think about it then his mask slips off and his bones poke on through and he has to save face in more ways than one- </span>
  <em>
    <span>oh wow, that was strange </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>oh wow, has anyone looked at the sky tonight, look at the stars, look at the stars and for the love of god don’t look at </span>
  </em>
  <span>me- and that’s a manner of pretending, isn’t it? So what’s one more? What does this one have over any other?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Not much, he doesn’t think. Nothing at all if he’s being honest. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure,” Noah says slowly, and it feels right enough. Maura’s half-smile kicks up into a full grin at that, so Noah supposes that he must have said the right thing then. It’s the little victories, these days. He watches as Maura weaves through the mess of dolls and blocks and various other toys with the same sort of otherworldly grace as before and surveys the cupboards with a complicated look flitting across her face, a twist of the mouth and a furrow of her brow and the dawning realization of someone that’s realizing that they didn’t actually expect to make it his far and now they have to figure out what to say </span>
  <em>
    <span>next, </span>
  </em>
  <span>goddammit.  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
    <br/>
  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you know what time it is?” she finally settles on, and Noah thinks that as good a conversation starter as any. Cryptic and confusing, two things that the both of them do very well and very often. Especially ambiguous and especially bizarre because there’s a clock on the wall and one on the microwave and one on the stove, each displaying 2:45 in big, bright red LED lights, and he knows that Maura can see at least two of these from where she’s leaned up against the counter, one hand sprawling over the Great Pile of Papers (an omnipresent mass made up of bills and drawings and mail that seems to come and go as it pleases) as the other rifles through the cupboard. He doesn’t quite know what she’s getting at, but then again he’s bored and he was waiting for this, so he figures that he may as well play along as best as he’s able to at the moment. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Time for you to get a watch,” he says, a bit mean and a bit petulant but Noah’s dead and feeling sad about it so he thinks that he should get to be a bit mean and a bit petulant, at least for a while. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Maura gives him an indulgent little smile, and indulgent little giggle as she pulls down two mugs and sets about making the tea. She finishes it fast enough and then walks over, placing a mug down in front of him that’s steaming hot and printed with a cartoon character that Noah doesn’t know the name of but feels like he should. He reaches out to pick it up, and though he holds it in his hands and knows of what he ought to be feeling, can imagine the curve and burn of the ceramic beneath his hand and can remember the slip of liquid over his tongue and the sting at the back of his throat and the heavy, warm weight in his stomach, he can’t feel any of it. Noah can’t feel much of anything these days. Noah is dead. Noah was fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>murdered </span>
  </em>
  <span>in a failed attempt to kickstart some ancient magical ritual.  </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Something of his unhappiness must show in his face because when Maura slides into the chair across from him her face is sympathetic. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Rough day?” she asks. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He shrugs. “No more than usual.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Maura huffs out a laugh. Her laugh doesn’t sound anything like Blue’s- it’s airier, not half as grounded. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I had a rough day too,” she tells him, leaning in close. “I’ve been outside trying to wake up something that one of the kids dug out from the attic. It does </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>want to cooperate, but I can’t leave it alone because I’ve never seen it before and that can be dangerous around these parts, yeah?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Noah parrots. He swirls the liquid in his mug, watching as some of it splashes over the rim and down to the table. It seeps into the wood and is gone within the minute, buried among the tens of thousands of other stains sprawled across the surface. He prods at it with his fingertip. Nothing happens. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I asked Calla what to do with it,” Maura continues, taking a sip of her own tea, “And she said that we should make one of you boys drive down to the lake and throw it in. Make it someone else’s problem, she said, because we’ve got enough of our own already. And I thought about it, but if one of you goes then Blue would go too whether we let her or not, and it's a very good thing to have a little spirit I think but it’s never a good thing to have Blue around strange psychic objects before we know what they do. Things have been broken like that before.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Like what?” Noah asks, perking up a bit at the mention of his friends. He does love talking about his friends, though he finds that even better than that is listening to </span>
  <em>
    <span>other </span>
  </em>
  <span>people talk about his friends because he tends to love them more than he can say. That and other people have good blackmail material, and Noah is far from a saint.  </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Like bones,” Maura says. Her face is serene, her mug not looking any less full though she’s been steadily taking sips from it. “Like promises about not letting Blue near strange psychic objects. Like a television, once. Orla was very unhappy about that.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I would be too,” Noah tells her. “Even if there’s never anything good on.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Friends reruns?” Maura asks. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Friends reruns,” Noah grumbles in agreement. And then, because if he’s going to be here then he may as well be curious: “Are any of you ever able to tell which channel has something on that you’ll actually like? Like with your psychic stuff?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Not that I know of,” Maura says, “But you can never be sure, with this sort of thing.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>That makes sense so Noah nods. They slip into silence, Maura drinking her tea and Noah making a game of how much of it he can spill over the sides of his mug before she finally calls him out on it. As it is he’s gotten a good quarter of it down on the table and he’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>very </span>
  </em>
  <span>aware at this point that Maura knows that he knows that she knows what he’s been doing, but he’s still feeling childish and petty. It’s been a long, long day. It’s been a long, long couple of years. Noah is seventeen, just as much as he’s not, and as it is seventeen year olds have shitty impulse control, and as it is </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span> seventeen year olds don’t have much to lose. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“So you’ve been having a rough day too, then?” Maura says. An invitation. Noah’s been having more than a rough day; Noah’s been feeling horrible in ways he hadn’t known a person could feel horrible, but here he is. Feigning normalcy the best he can and feeling wound so tight that’s it’s by the grace of dumb luck alone that he hasn’t snapped in two.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Noah replies, voice like a knife. Splish-splash goes the tea. “A long day, I guess. I didn't really do much. I visited Blue at school when she was eating lunch. They were having pizza but like, bad pizza, like an affront to pizza everywhere. She said that it tasted like cardboard.”  </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah misses shitty school lunches; he considers them something of a staple, something for anyone and everyone to bond over. Aglionby, for all its money and its many, many perks, had terrible food. The sort of overwrought, tiring dishes that were more for show than anything, little portions scooped out onto big plates and everything carrying a quiet, persistent aftertaste that was sort of like fish and sort of like onions and a lot like self-importance. Noah always ate everything anyways because he was placid enough but also a teenage boy, and when lunchtime crept close he became so snappish and indiscriminate as to be impossible to be around. That doesn’t really happen these days; these days Noah’s bad moods are sharper and more weighty, driven by the constant thrum beneath his skin. These days Noah’s bad moods are rooted in something deeper, something that he can’t stand to think about for too long. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“That school does make some terrible pizza. Blue brought some home once after Orla told her that it couldn’t be that bad, and-” Maura shudders, grimacing. “It’s not something I like to think about.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah can relate. There is something building up inside of him, something dark and ugly and angry that he ignores by sending more of his tea spilling over the side of his mug. Noah’s feeling something of a coward today and something of a child at that. It’s been a long, long day. It’s been a long, long couple of years.  </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“We should have Ronan dream up some pizza,” he says, instead of any of that. Honesty may be the best policy but he’s been cut loose for years and likes to think that he’s free to play by any rules that he pleases. “Because it’s dream pizza it could taste like anything and you could make tons of money off of it, especially ‘cause there’s no like, materials cost. You guys could sell it when people come for readings as a side thing. I can’t think of a name because I’m terrible with names but it would be great and people would love it. And you guys would be famous, like morning talk show famous, and then there would be something good on TV and </span>
  <em>
    <span>bam </span>
  </em>
  <span>that’s all sorts of problems solved all at once.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He’s rambling. He’s going off in all sorts of directions on some sort of tangent, and he can’t seem to pull himself together into anything coherent much less respectable, or- god forbid- </span>
  <em>
    <span>eloquent</span>
  </em>
  <span>. He sloshes the tea in his cup even faster, swirls and froths it up into a tiny whirlpool and then flicks the tag of the teabag back up into the mug so he can watch it flounder around like a toy ship. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll take it into consideration,” Maura says. “You’re quite the businessman, aren’t you? What would you even get from that? Credit? A cut of the profit?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah doesn’t know if it’s the teasing tone or the glint in her eye, the veneer of easy conversation or the small talk but that’s what does it. The whirlpool in his mug stops still and his insides go all tense and crowded and the lining in his head feels like it goes bright blood-red. The world’s stopped turning at some point he thinks, but the moonlight is as steady as ever and Maura Sargent is as steady as ever and the ache in his bones is as steady as ever, like a burn that won’t leave him the fuck </span>
  <em>
    <span>alone</span>
  </em>
  <span> or a candle lit on both ends, and Noah Czerny is kinda, sorta </span>
  <em>
    <span>sick </span>
  </em>
  <span>of it. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Well nothing, probably,” Noah says, and to his horror his voice hitches and cracks as he spirals down and down and down, right down into nothing. “It’s not like I can </span>
  <em>
    <span>do </span>
  </em>
  <span>much anyways. I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>, what the fuck would I do with money? Pick up some new clothes? Apply to college? Yeah, I’m sure that that’ll go over </span>
  <em>
    <span>real </span>
  </em>
  <span>fucking well, good for personal essays, </span>
  <em>
    <span>write about an event in your life that had a significant impact on you, </span>
  </em>
  <span>alright, alright, for one thing I was fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>murdered</span>
  </em>
  <span>! Possessed by a demon for a little while, tried to claw one of my friend’s eyes out, watched a few of my other friends </span>
  <em>
    <span>kinda </span>
  </em>
  <span>die but not really, that’s a little on the fence still- yeah, they’d love that, they’d love me! Nothing fucking wrong there, right? God, can you imagine my roommate? They’d be so confused! ‘Czerny’s never around, you’d think he was a fucking ghost!’”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He laughs, a hysterical bubble that forces its way out of his throat and then bursts sharp and horrified and terrible into the still nighttime air. His face twists and falls away and he hunches forwards, crowding his shoulders, and that’s that. His skin feels warm and gritty, his eyes too tight at the corners and his sweater as constricting as can be. Everything is welling up now, all the ugly things that he’s been pressing down; Noah Czerny feels that he’s coming to an end soon enough, knows it right down to his bones, and the weight of it is tearing him straight down the middle. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh dear,” Maura says, reaching out to touch him and thinking better of it at the last moment. Her hands hover half an inch from his, not unsure but hesitant all the same. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Anger burrows into his stomach, heated and warm and hard as a rock where it sits in one big lump. It warms him through until Noah finds himself jerking away from Maura in a fit of frustration and then lunging to the side so he can dump the rest of his tea onto the table without any stray droplets landing on her wrist. He stares at the growing puddle of tea for a moment, watery brown gone greenish-yellow in the moonlight, and his chest heaves out of habit as his head goes all fuzzy and he swings around to look at Maura, shame warring with frustration and confusion and some sharp, jagged emotion that he doesn’t quite know the name of. Maura looks back, as unruffled as ever, and then finally reaches to fold her hands over his, pushing her own mug towards him and then drawing back with a nudge and a nod. He stares at her for a second and then he dumps that out too, watches as the liquid splashes to the table and floods over the edge, pooling around the legs of his chair. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He could send the mug tumbling after it- he’s done similar things, and he’s done worse- but he doesn’t, first because Maura’s being very patient with him in the way of someone who’s raised a teenager of their own and second because he doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>want </span>
  </em>
  <span>to. Noah doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>want </span>
  </em>
  <span>to break the mugs. Noah wants to eat shitty school pizza and go to college and make bad decisions like a seventeen year old living away from their parents for the first time. Noah wants to live; Noah wants to live; Noah wants to live. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“So it’s been a </span>
  <em>
    <span>very</span>
  </em>
  <span> rough day then,” Maura says. “I’m sorry about that. Would you like to tell me about it? Talking can help, or so I’ve been told.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her face is still as ever, her smile fixed but not stilted. Noah presses the heel of his hand into his forehead and tries not to feel like he’s dying all over again. What exactly is there to say, that can describe how he feels? This isn’t something that he knows how to verbalize because it’s not something that he’s needed to speak about before; every now and then his mask slips and then his friends grow concerned and that hurts like nothing else, so Noah’s taken great pains to step back. If he were to say something, to take all the horrible little evils making themselves at home on the insides of his arms and legs and head, then what would he say? What would he even say? What could he even say?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m dead,” Noah tells her, words bumbling up his throat and sliding thick through his teeth. He brings his mug up to his face and holds it against his cheek, right where he knows the smudge to be when his face is patched together. He imagines the heat left behind by the long-gone tea; he imagines the warmth, imagines the shift of air in and out of his lungs, the press and flutter of his heart against his ribcage. Of all the things that make up a person and all the little things that made up Noah Czerny, the heartbeat is what he misses the most; the thump in his head as he tried to sleep and the fragile flutter beneath the skin of his wrist and the way it would pick up and trip and tremble when he talked to a cute classmate or the girl who worked at the library down the street. He’s starting to think that this whole thing might be sort of unfair. “I’m dead.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“So you are,” Maura replies. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Noah tells her, urgency creeping into his tone as he stands up and kicks his chair back, gives himself the free range of movement that a moment like this requires. “I’m dead. I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>. I don’t get to come back from this, not like Gansey or- or- </span>
  <em>
    <span>fuck, </span>
  </em>
  <span>like </span>
  <em>
    <span>any </span>
  </em>
  <span>of them or any of this, I don’t get to come back, I don’t get to keep on living or go to college or get a job or- </span>
  <em>
    <span>fuck</span>
  </em>
  <span>, drop out and live in my mother’s basement. This is </span>
  <em>
    <span>it </span>
  </em>
  <span>for me. This is it. I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
  <span></span>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then he tilts his head forwards and his spine and shoulders follow until he’s all curled and crowded up, and he sobs. Maura is not unfeeling where she sits across from him but she is cool; placid, like Noah used to be, until suddenly she’s standing and rounding the table to crouch next to him with one hand braced against the back of his chair and the other lowering to hover over his shoulder. He musters himself enough to raise his head and look her dead in the eye, defiance worming its way over his features like he’s daring her to say anything at all. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Instead she coaxes him up to standing and rests her hands just below his shoulders, rubbing slow, soothing circles into his skin. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Would you like a hug? she asks. Noah doesn’t think twice about it. Noah tumbles forward into her arms and pitches his head forwards to rest on her shoulder, all the fight draining out of him and giving way to the exhaustion that’s always been beneath it. Now Maura Sargent may look like Blue but she isn’t Blue, and she doesn’t have the same sort of powers that Blue does so the hug isn’t half as corporeal as it could be. He feels like a gust of cool air through Maura Sargent’s warmth, but if he stands very still and leans forwards a bit he can hear her heartbeat; </span>
  <em>
    <span>thump, thump, thump, </span>
  </em>
  <span>over and over steady and slow and familiar and-</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Noah thinks that he may miss his mother. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It’s been a long, long day. It’s been a long, long couple of years, and Noah Czerny is very, very tired. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He doesn’t know how long they stand there in the same way that he doesn’t know how long he waited for Maura to walk through the old screen door to meet him in the kitchen; he just knows that it’s long enough for his sobs to peter down into hiccups, for the white-hot rage that had filled his stomach to temper down to a smooth twist of glass. There’s no other sound but that of Maura’s breathing and then the chitters of the cicadas outside, the high-pitched noise cutting sharp and short through the warm nighttime air. Noah’s feeling all dried up and just as dead inside as on the out when Maura draws a breath in- the heavy sort, rife with intent- and starts to speak. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know how to fix this, I’m afraid,” she says, hands resting above his shoulder blades. “I wish I could give you some sort of answer, or a good reason or even any reason at all, but I’m no god and I’m no prophet and I can’t offer much, but I’ll offer all that I’m able because you’re hurting when you shouldn’t be, and you deserve to have someone at least </span>
  <em>
    <span>try </span>
  </em>
  <span>to do right by you. So here is what I know: sometimes there’s no good reason, and sometimes there’s no reason at all, and sometimes everything’s so unfair that it makes you want to scream and cry and break things and find whatever horrible, horrible thing thought it appropriate to put you through this and</span>
  <em>
    <span> throttle </span>
  </em>
  <span>them until they’ve felt even half the pain that you’re feeling. And god, I can promise you that I won’t rest until I’ve exhausted every possibility, until I’ve read every overpriced old book that I can get my hands on and pestered every person with even an ounce of magical energy that I’ve ever known, but I don’t know how this ends, and I have you feeling you know all too well what we’re coming too.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll do everything I can and more, right up until I can’t do anything any longer. I’ll make bargains, I’ll make promises, I’ll make sacrifices and I’ll push until I give out and even then I won’t stop, but I can’t give you any answers. Not as I am now, not with what little I know. So for now how about this- let’s drive down to the lake, and you can throw the thing from the attic in. We’ll see how far out you can get it. We can pick up rocks and I can show you how to skip stones, or we can catch minnows or we can look at the stars. There’s no road nearby so we’ll have to walk a little, but there’s no light out by the lake so when you look up you can see everything, all the stars and clouds and satellites and planes and planets. I can tell you the names and stories of the constellations, or you can tell </span>
  <em>
    <span>me</span>
  </em>
  <span> if you know them- I’ll admit that Blue’s always been much better at that sort of thing than I am- and we can talk and laugh and I’ll show you the spot where we had to mend the dock after Blue put her foot through it and we can find strange looking rocks, and we can not think about anything else for a while. How does that sound?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The clock over Maura’s shoulder- the little one, perched above the stove- still reads 2:45 in bright, flat numbers, and Noah gets the sick, sinking feeling that it’s mocking him. He turns from, it, buries his face in Maura’s shoulder and feels the soft fabric of her shirt and hears the soft puff of her breath right above his ear as another tiny sob wracks on through him and he hiccups out a watery laugh, one that sounds as tired and defeated as he must look. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright,” he says, voice quiet. The moon winks out him through the window, the branches of the big tree in the yard swaying back and forth, back and forth in the blue-white light, scattered sparsely with leaves. A frog croaks somewhere in the distance; even farther back there’s the rush of a car down the road, and beyond even that the hum of the ley line, as pervasive and constant as anything else on this earth, which is to say not particularly constant or pervasive at all as it’s too busy flirting with the border between </span>
  <em>
    <span>there </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>not there </span>
  </em>
  <span>and dragging Noah along for the ride.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And well, well, well, there are worse things that can be done than a break. He’s done worse things; he’ll do worse things. He'll do many, many things and </span>
  <em>
    <span>hell </span>
  </em>
  <span>he’s already done so many more and as it is he’s torn between this and that, one hand slipped from a ledge and the other held fast by Maura and her steady, comforting pressure, so he may as well let himself go for a little while, right? Just for a non-hour or two. Just long enough that he can pretend to breathe again.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And really, that’s all there is to it. The clocks are still stuck at 2:45 as Maura coaxes him from the shell of the house and out into the world, the two of them a four-legged beast beneath the cool night sky as Maura’s refused to remove her arm from around his shoulders and Noah hasn’t been putting up too much of a fight. That’s all there is to it, as they trundle into the small silver car at the end of the driveway; that’s all there is to it, as they hit the open road, Maura looking half-dead and Noah looking half-alive and the two of them quiet as the wind tugs it way through the trees. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>That’s all there is to it. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!</p>
<p>The idea for this hit me and then i wrote like 1500 words and i had to finish it but i'm going to finish the sarchengsy fic it interrupted i am GOING to finish the sarchengsy fic if it kills me because Noah may be my favorite character but Henry is a close second and maybe one day I’ll write some Henry and Noah interaction even though I’m pretty sure it could never happen canonically because you know what’s better than one favorite character? Two favorite characters</p></blockquote></div></div>
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